The Party's Over

By Alan Caruba

We all see the world through the prism of where we live. Most of us live in the cities and suburbs. From the early 1940s when my parents moved to the picture postcard town of Maplewood, N.J. that is where I grew up and have spent most of my life.

Maplewood is a quick half hour train trip into downtown Manhattan and is a bedroom community for many executives that work there. It is famous for its many tree lined streets, manicured lawns, and homes, many of which were built starting around the 1920s after the Erie Lackawanna made it a regular stop. Its school system was renowned. It’s still a beautiful town and its village shopping area was the setting for scenes in the film “One True Thing.”

When the property taxes on my home there continued to rise, myself and many other senior citizens who had lived in the township elected to move. My older brother had already set up house in Florida, God’s waiting room, but I elected to move one town over into a swanky new apartment complex, allowing me to make the short drive into the “village” of town every day to purchase sundries and get what, for me, passes for exercise.

What struck me today was the way the small office building in which my CPA’s firm is headquartered is bereft of any other firms. It used to house a photographer’s business and one that sold insurance. I left off my 2010 tax records. Across the street a take-out food store had closed its doors. The town’s pet store had departed not long ago.

As I walked toward my car I realized that yet another gift shop had bit the dust. Other shops, too. One of the town’s busiest real estate firms had a window filled with pictures and descriptions of homes for sale. My former home where I had lived for more than sixty years had changed owners twice in seven years.

The short drive back to my apartment complex included passing homes with for-sale signs, too numerous to ignore.

When the phone rings these days it’s usually one of a small circle of longtime friends. One of them runs a longtime, successful enterprise that matches people of differing expertise with reporters needing some quick information and insight, a quote on some subject. Talk radio and TV producers use it to find guests.

Over the twenty-seven years I have known my friend he went from running the business from his apartment to a large office with a full staff. He now runs it from his apartment and it is a virtual business. His directory of experts is print-on-demand for those who request a copy and many of the computer and web services he uses are provided from Bangalore, India.

Like a fish in water, it occurred to me that I haven’t met face to face with any of my clients in years. We communicate mostly via email or occasionally on the phone. I am trying to remember when I last put on a suit and tie. I can’t.

When I turn on the television news or listen to it on the radio, what I really hear is that everyone is waiting for the megalith we call the federal government to come up with a budget and to fund its function for another two weeks!

When a nation cannot operate in a predictable, rational way, it forces people to put a lot of ordinary decisions on hold.

That’s why a great swath of businesses is just waiting for someone to buy something. The ones that provide goods that are essential, food, toilet paper, things to keep the house clean, medications, are okay, but anything that is non-essential is moving far more slowly. Even the catalog operations that depend on moving all manner of household items are slashing their prices. The $10 “rehab exercise ball” is now $6.00. The $14 “ratchet pruner” is now $8.00.

I used to go to a nearby mall to purchase things. Now I go on the Internet and they are delivered in two or three days at most. The most extraordinary business in America is the delivery business, whether it’s Fedex or UPS.

As the price of gasoline goes up, reflecting the turmoil throughout the Middle East as it recedes further into its dark ages people are going to travel less. Visiting grandma will be by iphone. The huge business of trade conferences will be hard hit. In turn, hotels, airlines, and tourism will feel the affect.

Nobody has any idea how America will pay off the huge debt it has acquired—the bulk of it in just the last two years—and still Congress critters argue over cutting pitifully small pieces of it.

We have huge government departments and agencies that should simply be shuttered, along with their matrix of duplicated and overlapping programs that suck up millions, if not billions, annually. It won’t happen.

There is a lull in the life of the nation. Shops are closing. Homes are going unsold or foreclosed or both. Everything looks “normal”, but it isn’t. The party’s over.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Shut It Down

By Alan Caruba

With exquisite timing, I sent my passport renewal application to the agency responsible for issuing a new one at precisely the time when the federal government may be shut down over a dispute between a Republican House and the White House regarding U.S. debt and spending. It’s not like I am going anywhere and need it, but if I wanted to flee to country, I would be flat out of luck.

In 1995 there was a famous government shutdown when then-Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich and former President Bill Clinton locked horns over the Republican demand that some attention be paid to the funding for Medicare, education, the environment and public health.

Today, Medicare’s costs continue to imperil the fiscal stability of the nation, a prospect made worse by Obamacare, a so-called repair that managed to add millions more to its roles while taking millions from its funding. Lost in the current discussion of another shutdown is the way the Clinton’s “Hillarycare” went down in flames after the public soundly rejected it. Apparently socialists cannot take no for an answer.

The present House Republicans are striving mightily to trim a proposed Obama budget that everyone agrees is detached from reality after the past two years in which the nation’s debt has been obscenely increased in the midst of an economic crisis dating back to late 2008. At issue is the need to raise the “debt ceiling”, so Treasury can continue to borrow billions every day to keep the government functioning.

In 1995 President Clinton vetoed the spending bill sent to him and thus triggered a shutdown of “non-essential government workers” put on furlough, suspending “non-essential services” from November 14 through November 19 and from December 16 to January 6, 1996.

Speaker Gingrich had the misfortune of the shutdown occurring over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays and this was made infamous by a Newsweek cover that blamed him, not the President, for it.

To borrow a phrase from media critic, Bernard Goldberg, the same “slobbering love affair” that the media had with President Clinton has been the hallmark of the first two years of President Obama’s administration and policies. Blaming Speaker Gingrich was just too easy for the liberal mainstream media.

It is nothing less than tragic and stupid that we have to revisit 1995 sixteen years after the first shutdown because the issues then are the issues we have now. Except that now the stakes in terms of the nation’s financial and economic survival are just so much higher. Republicans in the House knew that then and know that now.

This is everyone’s fault because Americans, the voters, have apparently learned nothing in the interim. The borrowing and spending has metastasized to the point where it threatens the foundation of the federal government. For this the blame is shared by both political parties and their leaders.

So, shut it down.

I can wait for my passport renewal. If visitors to our national parks can’t get in, well, the bison, elk, and other wildlife will not notice. If folks cannot hike or camp it is a minor inconvenience. Some Washington D.C. museums will be closed. Meanwhile essential services such as our military, national security and law enforcement will continue. Social Security and other entitlement checks will be sent.

The only people rioting these days are privileged public sector union members who are wearing out their welcome. It is unlikely the public will respond any differently now than they did in 1995 which, if I recall, was with indifference.

Indeed, it was a holiday from the federal government and a learning experience as to just how vast it had become. Today it is even larger. And that’s the problem.

Simply put, the U.S. does not need a Department of Education that has managed to lower the scores of a generation or two of students squeezed through our schools like so much sausage. It surely no longer needs an Environment Protection Agency that is slowing economic development in every way possible.

What good is a Department of the Interior that denies American companies the opportunity to mine our huge deposits of coal—enough for several hundred years of electricity production—or to drill offshore or in ANWR for billions of barrels of oil and cubic feet of natural gas?

The Department of Health is responsible for administering Obamacare which at this time means issuing thousands of waivers, proof of the sheer idiocy of this legislative nightmare. If you’re old and need an organ transplant, go home and die.

In fact, department by department, agency by agency, we can find countless examples of costly programs that duplicate one another, regulators who do not regulate, and the prospect of thousands more to be hired by the Internal Revenue Service.

Shut it down. Let the House sort it out. Cut, cut, cut all the billions and trillions that must either be squeezed from those still holding a job or borrowed from China and Saudi Arabia.

Let the mainstream media howl like mad dogs because they never have and never will understand the logic of a budget that requires the nation to live within its means.

Shut it down. If it brings a scintilla of common sense and fiscal prudence in its wake, I am all for it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011